Saturday afternoon robot cooking

What happens when you combine an IR tracking PS3 Eyetoy, and a high-resolution projector? If you answered multi-touch display, you’re on the right track. Add a Wii Nunchuck controlled robot, a pinch of Community Core Vision tracking software combined with Processing, and the piece de resistance, a modified Memo TUIO particle system and you get the mesmerizing video above.

I’m usually not one for experiments in “physical computing” or any of that sort of thing, but I have to admit that is pretty impressive.

I agree with sarsface too, a logical evolution of this concept would be to have a two way interaction, where the digital effects could cause a change in the physical device. Like two tanks that could fire digital cannons, and each hit from a “shell” would hinder your ability to control the tank, until it stops moving and the game is over.

You could of course do the same basic thing with two toy tanks and IR, but this system would let you create weapons that would be too difficult (or outright impossible) to create in the real world; like mines, shots that bounce, homing shots, etc, etc.

Of course, if you read the page, this system is nowhere near that capable or complicated. It just tracks a single IR LED attached to the top of the vehicle and projects the visual effects onto those X,Y coordinates. Still, it is an interesting proof of concept.

how come no one nothiced that the jet engine is on the wrong end of the robot ? are the particles creating a gravity well sucking in the robot ?
otherwise cool reminds me of the interactive pool table where they did the same but instead of robots just shined really bright infrared onto the shiny balls to track mulitpoint.
seem there $30k system could easily be duplicated like so

I didn’t think it was supposed to be a thrust effect, I figured it was a blaster…thing. But now that you mention it, it does make more sense if that was supposed to be a jet blast.

Though as I understand this system, it doesn’t even have the ability to determine object orientation, as it just picks up a single IR LED. It could make an assumption based on the direction of movement, but that would easily be confused by a vehicle going backwards.

Yeah, after watching this unfold on Saturday, I’m definitely getting a robot kit this week. It’d be fun to develop a general-purpose arena model that could accommodate anything from soccer to basic combat.

Wow this is really amazing, i loved this idea in fact. Any ways on Saturday people are in weekend mood and in that mood they don’t want the hassle of cooking food and clean up stuffs. This is really very much helpful.